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The authors’ goal is to provide an overview and historical context for the various alternatives to the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) that have emerged over time. The authors found eight current alternatives that have emerged to address the EMH's flaws. Each of the proposed alternatives improves some of the assumptions made by the EMH, such as investor homogeneity, the immediate incorporation of information into asset values and the inadequacy of rationality to explain asset prices.

To come up with the list of studies relevant to this review article, the authors used three databases, namely Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. The first two were mostly used to get peer-reviewed articles while Google Scholar was used to extract articles that are still work in progress. The following words were used as the search queries; “efficient market hypothesis” and “alternatives to the efficient market hypothesis”.

The alternatives to the EMH presented in this article demonstrate that market efficiency is a dynamic concept that can be best understood with a multidisciplinary approach. To better comprehend how financial markets work, it is crucial to draw on concepts, theories and ideas from a variety of disciplines, including physics, economics, anthropology, sociology and others.

The authors comprehensively summarise the current state of the behavioural finance literature on alternatives to the EMH.

This study aims to evaluate the short-term impact of brokerage analysts’ recommendations on abnormal returns using a sample selected from the S&P BSE 100 in the Indian context. The efficient market hypothesis, specifically, its semi-strong form, is tested for “Buy” stock recommendations published in the electronic version of Business Standard. The crucial issue is, are there any abnormal returns that can be earned following a recommendation? If so, how quickly do prices incorporate the information value of these recommendations? It tests the impact of analyst recommendations on average abnormal returns (AARs) and standardized abnormal returns (SRs) to determine their statistical significance.

Using a sample of stock recommendations published in the e-version of Business Standard, the event study methodology is used to determine whether AARs and SRs are significantly different from zero for the duration of the event window by using several significance tests.

The findings indicate a marginal opportunity for profit in the short term, restricted to the event day. However, the effect does not persist, i.e. the market is efficient in its semi-strong form implying that investors cannot consistently earn abnormal returns by following analysts’ recommendations. Post the event date, the market reaction to analyst recommendations becomes positive, however, insignificant until the ninth day after the recommendation providing support to the underreaction hypothesis given by Shliefer (2000) and post-recommendation price drift documented by Womack (1996). The study contributes by using different statistical tests to determine the significance of returns.

There are important implications for traders, investors and portfolio managers. The speed with which market prices incorporate publicly available information is useful in formulating trading strategies. However, stock characteristics such as market capitalization, volatility and level of analyst coverage need to be incorporated while making investment decisions.

The study contributes by using different statistical tests to determine the significance of returns.

Despite volumes of research on the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) over the last six decades, the results are inconclusive as some studies supported the hypothesis, and some studies rejected it. The study aims to examine the market efficiency of the Indian stock market.

For analysis, nine Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) broad market indices were selected covering the study period from 01 January 2011 to 31 December 2020. The data collected for this study are daily open, high, low and closing prices of selected indices. The tools used in this study are: (1) unit root test to check the stationarity of time series, (2) descriptive statistics, (3) autocorrelation and (4) runs test.

The empirical findings of the study reveal that BSE broad market indices do not follow a random walk and Indian stock market is as weak-form inefficient.

The findings from this study provide several avenues for future research. One of the research implications is that anomalies in the statistical results by different academicians in the finance area need to be explained by future researchers.

Investment companies need to understand that extraordinary skills are required to beat the market to make abnormal returns. In an inefficient market where securities do not reflect the complete available information, it is challenging for the investment brokers to convince the customers about the portfolios they recommend to the public that the rate of return would be more than expected.

As economic growth is related to the growth in the financial sector, developing countries like India depend on the accuracy of the information. In the presence of asymmetric information, the fluctuations in the stock market would have serious harmful consequences on the economy.

Amid several controversies surrounding the EMH testing, this study is a modest attempt to provide evidence that the Indian stock market is in weak-form inefficient. However, it is essential to link investors' behaviour and trends observed in the financial sector to fully understand the implications of EMH.

This study aims to find the response by stock market against the announcements of quarterly earnings is empirically tested by exploiting event study methodology. Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) on Saudi stock exchange is also tried on.

The market model is applied to help gauge the expected returns and to illustrate abnormal returns around the event date.

The results established that Saudi Stock Market does not bear semi-strong form of EMH. How efficient is the Saudi market is also reflected through evidence of significant abnormal returns and post-earnings announcement drift around earning announcements dates.

The authors have not used analysts’ forecast as the expected earnings which are the limitation. As mentioned earlier, the authors used the quarterly earnings of the previous year as a proxy and that proxy could have been replaced by analysts’ forecast. Another limitation is that the trading volume in the event window is not considered.

The behavior of Saudi capital market is of much concern, and the study of this with a perspective of EMH is the significance of this paper.

All stakeholders closely watch earnings announcements and its share price movement around the announcement date. Recently, Saudi Arabia has opened its doors to foreign investors, and big foreign investors are going to enter into Saudi capital market, and after their entry, the behavior of market could be different. In the authors’ opinion, this is the right time to study the efficiency of Saudi market before the entry of foreign investors.

This study is based on the gap created by EMH of Saudi market using event methodology, observed in the existing literature, and it will be a contribution to literature.

This paper aims to examine the extent of price clustering in a selection of Islamic stocks listed in Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan and also investigates the determinants of the phenomenon at the firm level.

The author test the uniformity of price distribution in the selected securities. Then, the determinants of price clustering were investigated through multivariate analysis based on a binary logistic regression model. Following the arguments of Narayan et al. (2011), who emphasize the importance of considering firm heterogeneity when studying the phenomenon, the author conducts the empirical study at the firm level.

The evidence indicates that Islamic stocks show a mild level of price clustering. Only half of the stocks under analysis rejected the uniformity test in the distribution of prices. In these cases, investors exhibited a preference for prices ending at zero and five. The evidence does not confirm the cultural clustering theories. Price clustering is found to be positively associated with price level and relative bid-ask spread. Overall, the negotiation hypothesis, which predicts that investors prefer round prices to minimize the costs associated with negotiations, best explains most of our results.

The existence of price clustering is difficult to reconcile with the prediction of the efficient market hypothesis that prices should follow a random walk. Moreover, the evidence indicates that Muslim investors share a preference for round prices in some settings, under the assumption that Islamic stocks are mostly traded by Muslim investors.

To the author’s best knowledge, this is the first study to address the subject of price clustering in Islamic stocks.

The study considers time-varying risk premium in investigating the capability of technical analysis (TA) to predict and outperform a buy–hold strategy in Bitcoin exchange rate returns.

The study tests the technical trading rule of fixed moving average (FMA) on daily actual and equilibrium returns of Bitcoin exchange rates. The equilibrium returns are computed using dynamic CAPM in conjunction with a VAR-MGARCH (1, 1) system. The empirical evaluation of the study uses a case study of four Bitcoin exchange rates (BTC/AUD, BTC/EUR, BTC/JPY and BTC/ZAR) for the period 19 June 2010 to 30 October 2020.

The findings are consistent with related studies in conventional foreign exchange markets that find TA to be profitable, especially in emerging markets. Nevertheless, the consideration of risk premium has the effect of reducing the abnormal returns. Also, further robust tests reveal that Bitcoin returns possess a momentum effect which prompts further study in efficient market hypothesis research.

The empirical findings of this study should benefit portfolio managers and active investors on the strength of TA to predict returns in a speculative market like the Bitcoin exchange rate market.

The study takes cognisance that cryptocurrency trading is speculative in nature which renders it a good candidate for TA methods. While there are studies that have explored the value of TA in Bitcoin exchange rates, these studies fail to incorporate the effects of time-varying risk premiums, the strength and focus of the current paper.

The main purpose of the research is to determine if the relationship between trading volume and price changes is connected to market effectiveness and to use the volume-price relationship to compare the efficiency levels of foreign markets. The degree of the relationship is determined in this study, and the efficiency levels of different countries' capital markets are compared.

In this study, 1,024 observations are used as a data set, which includes daily closing prices and trading volume in the stock market indices of 25 countries between the dates of 01.12.2016 and 31.12.2020. In the first step of the analysis, descriptive statistics of price and volume series are examined. The stationarity of the series is then controlled using the ADF unit root test. Simple linear regression models with the dependent variable of trading volume are generated for all stock market indices after each series has reached stationarity, and the ARCH heteroscedasticity test is used to determine whether these models contain the ARCH effect. Because all models have the ARCH effect, autoregressive models are chosen, and EGARCH models are conducted for all indices to see whether there is an asymmetry in the price-volume relationship.

The study concludes that the stock market in the United States is the most effective, since it has the strongest relationship between trading volume and price changes. However, because of the financial distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between price and trading volume is lower in Eurozone countries. The price-volume relationship could not be observed in some shallow markets. Furthermore, whereas the majority of countries have a negative relationship between price changes and transaction volume, China, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have a positive relationship. When prices rise in these countries, investors buy with the sense of hope provided by the optimistic atmosphere, and when prices fall, they sell with the fear of losing money.

The study's most significant limitation is that it is difficult to ascertain a definitive conclusion about the subject under investigation. In reality, if the same research is done using data from different countries and time periods, the results are quite likely to vary.

As a result of the study, investors can decide which market to enter by comparing and analyzing the price-volume relationship of several markets. According to the study's findings, investors are advised to examine the price-volume relationship in a market before beginning to trade in that market. In this way, investors can understand the market's efficiency and whether it is overpriced.

The relationship between price movements and trade volume gives crucial information about a capital market's internal structure. Some concerns can be answered by assessing this relationship, such as whether the market has a speculative pricing problem, how information flows to the market, and whether investment decisions are rational and homogenous. Empirical studies on modeling this relationship, on the other hand, have not reached a definite outcome. The main reason for this is that the price-to-volume relationship fluctuates depending on the market structure. The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the literature by presenting the reasons why this critical issue in the literature cannot be answered, as well as empirical findings.

The significance and originality of this research are that it examines the price-volume relationship to evaluate the efficiency levels of various markets. This relationship is being investigated in a number of multinational studies. These researches, on the other hand, were conducted to see if there is a relationship between trading volume and market volatility, and if so, how that interaction is formed. The size of the price and volume relationship is emphasized in this study, unlike previous studies in the literature.

Efficient market hypothesis implies that the past price movements do not help forecast future price movements. Thus, it is impossible to consistently benefit by a technical trading strategy. On the other hand, technical analysts claim that the historical price movements are useful in predicting future price movements. These two lines of arguments are mutually contradictory. This paper reasonably assumes that the more efficient markets are, the worse will be the investment performance of technical analysis, and that as financial market‘s trading volume grows and with the elapse of time, the efficiency of markets should improve. This implies that after the launch of a new financial asset, market efficiency would improve with increased trading and elapsed time. In this paper, the duration analysis technique is used as a forecasting model and applied to measure the efficiency of Korean futures market and the won/dollar exchange rate market.

Because systemically important banks' takeovers in the US were expected to contain the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) but were found to have imposed large cost on shareholders, this paper examines the effectiveness of these acquisitions during the GFC and investigates what went wrong with the market for corporate control of large banks.

This paper presents a model of the disciplinary takeover based on the efficient market hypothesis which provides appropriate measures for it to examine the financial performance of acquiring banks after takeover.

The results indicate that the takeover market for large banks was ineffective in two aspects: the market did not distinguish strong banks from weak banks before the crisis and acquirers performed worse after takeover. Such ineffectiveness reflects the fundamental deficiencies of large bank takeovers arising from some key distinguishing characteristics of large banks.

The sample size of systemically important banks' takeovers is small so large-sample standard statistical inferences cannot be used.

The deficiencies of large bank takeovers need to be rectified in order to aid in resolving future crises.

This paper provides rare and detailed insight based on case studies of large US bank takeovers during the GFC.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise and reflect upon key issues at the interface of prices, information and regulation with a focus upon the stock market in context. Reflecting upon academic research in the area of efficient markets, and regulatory policy, the concern is to discern issues in terms of policy and support for policy. What does the research imply for policy? Is it possible that the research, perhaps given its rhetoric, can be misinterpreted in relation to policy? The study is also concerned to develop avenues for future research based on these considerations.

The paper is an analytical and critical review and writing.

The reading of the research suggests a pragmatic regulatory policy that should be concerned to improve stock market functioning, including with respect to information, as well as the context of which this is part. At the same time, the literature may be read as promoting anti-regulatory policy.

On the one hand, these are consistent with the pragmatic policy referred to above. On the other hand, further research is suggested to explore substantively the rhetoric of the research and its interpretation and to explore understandings of the research and its implications amongst key constituencies in practice.

The concern is to bring key insights from the academic literature together with a view to promoting a pragmatic policy orientation, while cautioning in a critical perspective about how this academic literature and research might be interpreted from a policy perspective.